Cake Classes 1 & 2

Kendra is nuts about the Cake Boss.  Her current dream is to go to Hoboken, meet him and eat some of his bakery yummies.  Our local Hobby Lobby store offers cake decorating classes regularly, so we signed up!  It is a four week class, one day per week for two hours each session. 

I've decorated many a cake for birthdays and have done the "self-taught" method of decorating.  I have figured out simple things like borders and "stars", etc.  I don't know how to make flowers, though!  And I've been pleasantly surprised to learn a ton of stuff so far in only two classes.  Like for one---did you know the magic number of minutes to let your cake cool in the pan is 10?  Less or more time results in problems.  The cake box says 15! 

Our first class taught us things like tips for baking a good cake, frosting consistency (key when doing decorating!) and we learned how to fill and use piping bags and tips.  We bring all our supplies to class, and this time we had to bring six flat cookies (like sugar cookies).  We piped patterns with the star tip.

Kendra watches as our instructor, Marsha, domonstrates.

Practice piping stars.

Piping stars on cookies.

In our aprons!

Our next night involved icing and decorating a real cake.  We brought a baked cake and all the frosting (they gave us a recipe for a decorating buttercream).  They also taught us how to torte a cake to put a filling inside it.  We each worked with one eight inch layer.  Kendra chose to fill her cake with blueberry (pie filling) and I did strawberry. 

We learned how to color our icing with color gels, which I have never used and LOVE.  The Wilton colors are vibrant and gorgous, and a little gel goes a long way.  Then we learned how to ice the whole cake without making a crumby mess (takes practice!) and how to control our piping bag when making designs or shapes that require consistent pressure and movement.  We learned a "dot" and another shape I can't remember the name of, but it is basically a blob but you can see it's use in the pictures of the cakes we made.

Handy enough, my team at school was celebrating three birthdays the day after our cake class, so Kendra and I provided the cake for dessert.  I certainly didn't want to have that much cake in my house!  We are planning to share all our creations!

So we colored icing, iced, and decorated.  Here are our two cakes.

Looking closely, you can see the bottom part of the cupcake (the "liner" part) uses that blob design.  You basically start with a dot and move the tip down the cake. 

Kendra wanted me to post pictures of both cakes and see if people could guess which one she did and which I did: 

Because I brought them to school for our birthday lunch, we showed our class and had them guess who made which one.  The vote was almost split even down the middle.  I think that is pretty awesome, since this is Kendra's very first attempt at frosting and decorating.  Either that or I suck.  :-)  I had to help her with the frosting part since she couldn't apply enough pressure to move the frosting around effectively, but all the decorating is her.

What's your guess???

Ok.  I'll tell you.

Hers is the YELLOW cake.  :-)